Being Human Today : Art, Education and Mental Health in Conversation

This collection stages a conversation between art, education, and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today.

This book moves beyond the suggestion that “the arrival of the I” in the world would require strong educational or therapeutic interventions or would be a matter of free expression without boundaries. The chapters explore new possibilities for the humanizing work of art, education, and mental health in the world today.

Of interest to academics and scholars in art, education, and mental health, this book will also be suitable for students and practitioners in these fields—mental health practitioners, teachers, and teacher educators, and those working in the arts and arts education. 
 

Education, mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life, and living it well, has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are, differs from time to time, from location to location, and even from individual to individual. In both education and mental health there is a strong pressure to think of being human as a technical problem that in some way can be ‘fixed’ by powerful, research-based interventions. Also arts are quickly turned into an instrument for fixing problems. While such fixing may be possible, and may appear to be quite successful from one perspective, it clearly runs the risk of turning students and clients into objects – things to be acted upon, rather than human beings to encounter and act with. This book stages conversations between art, education, and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today. Moving beyond the suggestion that this requires ‘strong’ educational or therapeutic interventions or can be resolved by means of individual expression, the chapters explore new possibilities for 'the arrival of I’.